Gosnell’s defense attorney: This is an “elitist, racist prosecution”

Erika JohnsenPosted at 6:41 pm on April 29, 2013

The defense presented their closing arguments in the Kermit Gosnell murder/infanticide/corruption of minors/solicitation/and etcetera trial on Monday, but not without the inevitable baseless crack at the prosecution’s true motives. Unfortunately, you probably knew this was coming:

Defense lawyer Jack McMahon delivered his closing argument on behalf of abortionist Kermit Gosnell on Monday, accusing prosecutors of “manipulating” the case to engage in an essentially “racist” prosecution of the man charged with four counts of first-degree murder, killing babies born alive during abortions by snipping their spinal cords with surgical scissors.

“Never have I seen the presumption of innocence so trampled on, stomped on,” said McMahon in court today, adding that the Philadelphia district attorney’s office “tried to manipulate everybody” and was pursuing an “elitist, racist prosecution.”

“Dr. Gosnell is not the only one doing abortions in Philadelphia,” McMahon said, “but he was an African American singled out for prosecution.”

“We know why he was targeted,” he said. “If you can’t see that reality, you’re living in some sort of la-la land.”

Riiiight. Because I’m sure that ‘racist elitism’ is among the prosecution’s only motivations, even though Gosnell himself was a practitioner of actual racism on the regular:

…an office where white women were attended to by a doctor and black women were pawned off on clueless untrained staffers. Any single one of those things would itself make for a blockbuster news story. Is it even conceivable that an optometrist who attended to his white patients in a clean office while an intern took care of the black patients in a filthy room wouldn’t make national headlines?

The leaders of two black anti-abortion groups today denounced West Philadelphia abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell as a “racist of the worst kind” and a “butcher who preyed on the women and girls of his own race.”

Day Gardner, president of the Washington-based National Black Pro-Life Union and the Rev. Clenard Howard Childress Jr. of Learn Northeast, based in Montclair, N.J. spoke to reporters outside the Criminal Justice Center in Center City as Gosnell’s murder trial continued inside. …

“Kermit Gosnell killed children because he could,” Gardner said. “After all, they were mostly black children and who will really care about black babies? Just another black child – dead in Philadelphia.” …

But the grand jury report said state officials wanted to avoid a controversial political issue and turned a blind eye to Gosnell because his practice largely affected poor, inner-city African American women.

And as for the prosecution’s supposed “elitism”? Apparently, it’s “elitist” to criticize the filthy, squalid conditions, unmet health standards, and ill treatment at Gosnell’s clinic because, “if everything was done right… then you wouldn’t have low-cost health care,” according to Gosnell’s defense attorney. Nutshell version: ‘Gosnell is the real victim here, everybody, and his actions were nothing short of courageous, so just move along!’ Unbelievable.